It is unfathomable that yet another Texas blowhard governor has emerged as a front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination. The persistent appeal of the mythology of Texas as a model for the nation defies the lessons of logic and experience, and yet here we are with Rick Perry, a George W. Bush look-alike, as a prime contender to once again run our nation into the ground.

To begin with, Texas is not and never will be a model for the nation unless the other states discover similarly rich deposits of oil and natural gas that account for one-third of jobs and supply 40 percent of tax revenues within those states. If Texas energy receipts and jobs helped float Gov. Bush’s reputation, they have been nothing short of miraculous for Perry’s tenure. The price of oil rose from $25 a barrel when Lt. Gov. Perry replaced the newly elected President Bush to $147 in 2008 and has stayed at more than $80 a barrel since, to the dismay of anyone who has to buy gasoline.

In addition, thanks to breakthroughs in oil field technology that Perry had nothing to do with, there have been controversial new drilling techniques that have vastly expanded the exploitation of gas and oil reserves, producing many of the new jobs that the Texas governor claims. For a relatively ineffectual governor, in a state in which the part-time Legislature holds the power, to take credit for this job boom is as ludicrous as a Saudi prince bragging of his entrepreneurial skills as the source of royal wealth.

Unfortunately, the boom in the energy industry has not spread to those in the state stuck in less lucrative sectors of the economy. Texas remains tied with Mississippi for the largest number of workers earning wages equal to or less than the federal minimum wage. This is particularly true for the majority of nonwhite Texans, who account for a good portion of the state population increase that Perry brags about. It will be interesting to see how he handles the immigration issue in light of the fact that the manufacturing sector, particularly automobiles, is dependent on robust traffic of parts and workers across the border from Mexico.

It should be added that much of the non-energy job growth is in the public sector, which has been in part financed by the federal government that Perry lambastes. As the Austin American-Statesman newspaper points out: “… [A]lmost half of the state’s job growth the past two years was led by education, health care and government, the sectors of the economy that will now take a hit as federal stimulus money runs out and the state’s 8% cut in state spending translates into thousands of layoffs among state workers and teachers in the coming months.”

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"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."Honore de Balzac

"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it."~Harry S. Truman

CHECK OUT THIS REPLY TO THE TRUTHDIG ARTICLE I POSTED ABOVE. IT'S PRICELESS!

By Inherit The Wind, August 17 at 9:05 pm Link to this comment

Quote:

I know this guy won’t look at thread show facts, figures, and dates demonstrating conclusively that the New Deal worked—until it was strangled by the 1937 Edition of the TeaParty, which re-ignited the Depression.

You can’t grow a nation without infrastructure, modern, up-to-date infrastructure, and ours is over 50 years old since it was last updated and crumbling. Infrastructure is the foundation of private growth, but government has to make it happen. Nobody’s building the next Brooklyn Bridge or Golden Gate Bridge with private money to make a profit.

So you invest in infrastructure, and make it a requirement that all (or most) companies must be domestic, and workers must be citizens or permanent residents intending to become citizens. They spend it on food, clothing, shelter, maybe some extra on TVs, cell phones. The people who sell it to them need jobs and people expand or create business to serve them. Those people in turn spend their money, and so on and so on. When a fundamental business enters a community this is what happens, and when they pull it out, ten times or more people lose their jobs than just the ones they lay off.

But, it works the same way with infrastructure, only, when the Government pulls out to move to another area, it leaves behind the tools for other fundamental businesses to come in. Transportation. Communication, Worker Housing, Worker services…all this is now there for companies to build in. This isn’t anything like “Socialism”. That’s just the new code-word for “Dirty Commies” used to smear ANYTHING that doesn’t benefit the few on top.

Think Research Triangle Park is ...SOCIALIST???? It was build by the State of North Carolina to attract businesses, high-tech businesses to the state, located where hundreds of thousands can get there to the Park, from all the points on the compass. “Socialist”? You gotta be outta your mind!

So, in all the years “The Coiffure” has been governor of Texas, did he build infrastructure? No! A new use of Texas land, that allows multi-use, is wind energy. There are vast wind farms, but….they cannot grow. Why? Because “Mr. Hair” wouldn’t and didn’t invest in powerline infrastructure, in part because the oil companies were paying him off. Non-polluting, non-consuming power in vast amounts and vast economic opportunities for Texas are SHUT DOWN because “The Coiffure” isn’t interested in them.

Note that Mr. Perry appointed an Enron exec to a major state board and the very NEXT DAY, Ken Lay sent him a check for $50,000. Perry’s answer: “What a coincidence.”

Socialism is the state owning all or most of the means of production. Socialism is NOT regulation. Socialism is NOT creating a banking system. Socialism is NOT social welfare programs.

All those who call these things “Socialism” are liars and most know it.

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"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."Honore de Balzac

"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it."~Harry S. Truman

Perry prides himself on issues and Texas "successes" that actually expose his incompetence.

Texas Governor Rick Perry has ridden into the GOP presidential race on his high horse, threatening to ‘get ugly’ with Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chairman, stopping just short of accusing him of treason, and catering, as expected, to the most radical of the radical right wing.

READ ABOUT IT AT THE LINK

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"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."Honore de Balzac

"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it."~Harry S. Truman

In state after state in which Republican/Tea Partyers took over governorships and legislatures there has been an aggressive and successful drive to gut workers' collective bargaining rights, shed thousands of jobs, gut environmental protections and food safety regulations all to the benefit of the rapacious corporate hogs who are enjoying unprecedented profits.

Commensurate with declining wages and job benefits is the yawning income gap between the super rich and corporate billionaires like the Koch brothers and the hoi polloi who are being discarded as used-up commodities thrown on the scrap heap.

The leitmotif of all the Republican candidates and their extremist Tea Party spawn has been to wage a propaganda war depicting the super rich as victims of a socialist president whom they repeatedly disdain and revile with words like, "He's not an American citizen, he's a Marxist-Socialist Kenyan, Luo, Mau-Mau tribesman who has a different world view from the 'rest of us.'"

Recently, Wall Street protesters have cracked the garrisons of greed and cleared some of the smoke screens that up to now have insulated the swindlers who still operate with little or no oversight. Republicans are pinning the blame on the president for our country’s economic ills hoping that their own impotence and failure to do their jobs in congress will go unnoticed by voters in November 2012.

Nefarious, callous corporate pimps like John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell, have made as their number one priority the defeat of Barack Obama in 2012 while they astonishingly stifle legislation which could create jobs for millions of unemployed Americans. They are now holding emergency relief and disaster funds hostage to their demands that every penny released for providing humanitarian aid must be offset by billions in cuts from other essential programs.

Each and every bill that comes up for a vote in the top-heavy Republican House will be tied directly to dissembling and de-funding Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the upcoming annual budget. The fiscal year 2012 starts on October 1 but every single agency and department funding will include riders lowering capital gains taxes from 15% to 10% and lowering corporate income tax rates from 35% to 25%.

There are currently 3,066 bills which have either passed the House or are pending (the number grows almost daily). Dozens of these bills include language to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, but they also go directly at the heart of agencies created to protect the health and welfare of the American people. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/d ... d112HR.lst:

In almost every Republican debate there is a wish list of specific agencies they view to be obstacles to corporate profits which must be de-funded and eliminated entirely: EPA, U.S. Department of Education, workers' health and safety standards defined by OSHA, USDA and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Like a superior army with overwhelming fire power the object of winning any war is to win it with stunning surprise and lightning speed. In order to achieve their goals for total dominion (meaning unbridled Republican control of every lever of government) it was necessary to employ the most visceral of methods, namely, fear, religious superstition and a blind-faith unanimity that has expressed itself in what Republicans repeatedly refer to as “American exceptionalism.”

As an example, the war against Iraq we know had little to do with America’s security interests but it did engender a mind-set in the Bush cortege that the best way to advance corporate interests was through effective propaganda, deceit and misdirection. War became that adroit bit of subterfuge that numbed the public into supporting the lie over non-existent WMD. The idea that we had to fend off al Qaeda in Iraq held the nation in constant fear; If we didn’t send our armies into that country, they said, Americans would have to fight off the terrorists in the aisles of Wal-Mart at home.

As a result, the outsourcing of jobs and manufacturing to cheap Indian and Chinese labor was accelerated during those 8-years of Bush-Cheney jingoism. “America at War” crawls appeared at the bottom of TV screens that Americans were reminded of daily. And who can forget the George W. Bush lapdog and factotum, Condoleezza Rice’s oft-repeated omen, “But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”?

MORE AT THE LINK!

AND IF YOU COULD DONATE A COUPLE OF BUCKS TO THE SMIRKING CHIMP, I KNOW THEY WOULD APPRECIATE IT. WE DON'T WANT TO SEE THIS LIBERAL TRUTH TELLER GO DOWN FOR A LACK OF FUNDING!

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"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."Honore de Balzac

"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it."~Harry S. Truman